Germany - Minimum wage for nursing staff ends wage dumping - March 25, 2010

The ver.di services union welcomes the decision in favour of a minimum wage for nursing staff (“Pflegemindestlohn”) and hopes that the decision will soon be put into practice. Ver.di board member, Ellen Paschke, said: “This decision is long over due. Anyway, it terminates extreme forms of wage dumping.” Earlier, representatives of employers and employees in the relevant committee at the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs agreed upon a minimum wage, to be effected as of 1 July 2010, for the western part of the country of Euro 8.50 and for the eastern part of Euro 7.50. Paschke added that employee representatives and part of the employers were in favour of a clearly higher minimum wage, and that a differentiation between West and East 20 years after the unification could hardly be justified.

German: http://presse.verdi.de/pressemitteilungen/showNews?id=2f47715e-37f9-11df-6666-0019b9e321cd

This article was published in the Collective Bargaining Newsletter. It aims to facilitate information exchange between trade unions and to support the work of ETUC's collective bargaining committee. For more information, please contact the editor Maarten van Klaveren, Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS) M.vanKlaveren@uva.nl. You may find further information on the ETUI atwww.etui.org, and on the AIAS at www.uva-aias.net. © ETUI aisbl, Brussels 2009.